Word.ws English Dictionary

bone idle

bone idle is the alternative spelling of bone-idle.

Meaning of bone-idle

Adjective

bone-idle (not comparable)

  1. (Commonwealth, Ireland, UK, idiomatic) Utterly lazy.
    • For the last three weeks I have been going what you call bone-idle.1836, Thomas Carlyle, New Letters

Questions about bone idle

What is bone idle the alternative spelling of?
Bone idle is the alternative spelling of bone-idle.

Words near bone idle in the dictionary

  1. bone grafts
  2. bone hard
  3. bone head
  4. bone heads
  5. bone hurting juice
  6. bone idle
  7. bone in her teeth
  8. bone in one's body
  9. bone in the throat
  10. bone lace
  11. bone laces

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bone idle (page history and authors); bone-idle (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “bone idle.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bone_idle. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.